“Following the civil rights movement, veganism is the next step for moral progress in our society. I think the movement will follow the same historical trajectory as all previous rights movements - through denial and anger, but finally acceptance.”

– Ruby Roth, author of That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals 

“It is racism when we choose to save one white person over two blacks. It is speciesism when we choose to save an orphaned an-encephalitic human infant whose existence is a secret over a chimpanzee.”

– UrConfused

Some vegans like to think of veganism as the final frontier in ethical equality, the movement that could finally put an end to the discrimination and violence that humans have practiced since splitting into tribes. It’s a common enough view that sexism, ableism, racism, religious discrimination, classism and heterosexism have to go. All this leaves, say some vegans, is speciesism: and worldwide veganism would crush that.

But does it really?

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals opens with the sentence “Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.” That sounds like it’s supposed to be a criticism, but then for the next 266 pages, Foer proceeds to badger Americans into restricting their diets even more than that.

No wonder so many vegans like that book! Vegans sometimes portray themselves as rebels subverting the mainstream, upending SAD-ist notions of “tradition, convenience, habit and taste,” and yet what veganism usually comes down to is piling on new taboos.

The early vegan pioneers deserve credit for pointing out the fatal paradox in lacto-ovo vegetarianism – simply avoiding meat doesn’t address the issues that vegetarians actually want to address – but then they just took the vegetarian idea and added even more restrictions to it, defining veganism as:

A way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.

If the first official vegans had been less hasty to spell out the dictates of their philosophy and had clearly defined the sentiment of veganism while leaving the application open to interpretation, maybe veganism wouldn’t be as commonly mired in dogmatism as it is now. Seven decades after “Vegan” exploded into the world, everyone’s first exposure to it is still, “Vegans don’t eat or wear animal products,” which presumes a robust line between animal and vegetable that isn’t actually there and makes it sound like veganism is a set of restrictions in search of a motive. 

If vegans want to convince us that it’s ethical to eat plants and unethical to eat animals, they need a coherent reason for this. So vegans settled on sentience. And yet when people want to eat non-sentient animals and say it’s okay by vegan ethics, the vegan majority gets upset. Christopher Cox outraged a ton of vegans with his “Consider the Oyster” manifesto that held up non-sentient oysters as a veganism-compatible animal food. Well, vegans… if oysters aren’t sentient, what is the problem?

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In the entry “How Animals Eating Each Other Royally Screws Veganism” (which I probably should have given a more philosophical sounding title), I pointed out the obvious: vegans are flirting with nihilism when they say there is nothing morally wrong with non-human omnivores eating other animals simply because these flesh-devouring devils don’t have a conscience and thus don’t believe in right and wrong.

If it were inherently wrong to intentionally kill a gazelle, I theorized, then it would be wrong to do so even if you weren’t aware that it was wrong to kill a gazelle. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with eating meat if you weren’t aware of its wrongness — a stance that vegans admittedly do sort of lean toward when they say that eating meat is less immoral before you’ve seen Earthlings. 

If zero moral rules apply to creatures who experience zero sensations of right and wrong, then wouldn’t only one moral rule apply someone who experiences only one sensation of right and wrong? In other words, if animals are off the hook because they don’t experience any morality, it would seem to follow that individual moral rules only apply to people who feel those particular rules. You can’t say that everyone who is capable of feeling right and wrong is obligated to follow every plausible moral rule, because there are just too many of them, most of which are compelling to some people but not others. Which would mean that it is not immoral for us to eat meat as long as we do not personally feel that it is immoral to do so. 

Arguably.

The reason I’m dusting off this oldie is that a commenter who recently barraged it with comments disagreeing with my conclusions (wtf?!) did concede one of the points I made: if it is not morally wrong for animals to commit violence because they are not guided by moral considerations, then the actions of amoral human psychopaths also cannot be judged wrong.

Through experience, observation and training, psychopaths do know what is popularly accepted as right and wrong, and they realize they’ll be punished for behavior deemed wrong if they are caught. However, this obedience to rules they do not believe in is no morally different from a dog who is trained, through fear of punishment or through positive rewards, to behave in ways humans like. In both cases, if the amoral being violates the training, they cannot be said to have committed an objective moral wrong, since they have no conscience, do not experience the sensation of wrongness, and so operate outside of morality.

And abolitionist-esque vegans agree!

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In my entry “Problems With the Argument From Marginal Cases and Using Sentience as a Basis for Rights,” I attempted to debunk the argument from marginal cases, the keystone argument that holds up obligatory veganism and the notion that sentience is the basis for rights.

I’m getting tired of summarizing the argument from marginal cases, so in case you’re unfamiliar with it, here is Jack Norris and Ginny Messina’s take on it from Vegan For Life:

A human rights ethic suggest that no human—not just intelligent humans, but also babies, infants, and those who are mentally challenged—should be abused and used by others for whatever purpose they like. This raises the question about whether rights should be extended to animals. The idea that if we grant rights to humans of lesser intelligence or ability, we should also grant rights to animals is sometimes referred to as the argument from marginal cases. If intelligence and capability are not criteria for the possession of rights, why would animals—who have the capacity to feel fear and pain—be excluded from moral consideration? Some philosophers may reject the argument from marginal cases, but we have never known any of them to provide a compelling reason for doing so. (234 - 235)

Jeez, okay, I’ll try to do better this time.

First, for nostalgia’s sake, let’s look at the points I made in that earlier entry:

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I talk a lot about the argument from marginal cases on this blog, because it’s the moral equation that glues logical veganism together. This argument is the bridge that makes it possible to think of humans and other animals as morally equivalent. It’s what allows vegans to say “what if you did that to humans?” every time you talk about some aspect of animal use that you don’t think is so bad. If you’ve ever heard a vegan say something about how if you eat animals, you should be cool with eating babies, lurking in the background is the argument from marginal cases. 

Welp, time for yet another argument from marginal cases summary. (Skip this paragraph if you already know what it is.) The argument from marginal cases is an attempt to thwart the meat eater desire to draw a solid line between humans and other animals, that line which permits people to think it’s okay to kill and eat other animals even though they wouldn’t do the same thing to humans. The main philosophical excuses meat eaters make for this line is that other animals operate on a basic cognitive level that often doesn’t go much beyond survival, these animals aren’t living out a story because they can’t really make plans or have ambitious goals, they can’t function as equal members in our society, and they cannot enter moral exchanges with us. To this, marginal-case-thumping vegans say, “But we give rights to babies and the severely mentally impaired, and they operate on a basic cognitive level, don’t have ambitions, can’t function as equal members in our society and cannot enter moral exchanges with us. Therefore, not giving rights to animals too is speciesist.”

I don’t think the argument from marginal cases works overall (I explain why in this entry, and I’ll take another swing at it in my next entry), but I believe the example of babies is especially problematic. My reasoning for this is somewhat obscure and only applies to a subset of vegan beliefs, but unless you don’t like nitpicky minutiae for some reason, I’m sure you want to know it anyway.

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In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.” As you might have guessed from the title, the paper intended to show that a diet including ruminant animals fed on grass would kill fewer animals than a diet based purely on vegan agriculture. Davis wrote:

[A] vegan diet doesn’t necessarily mean a diet that doesn’t interfere in the lives of animals. In fact, production of corn, beans, rice, etc. kills many animals as this paper will document. So, in 1999, I sent an email to [animal rights philosopher Tom] Regan, pointing this out to him. Then I asked him, “What is the morally relevant difference between the animals of the field and those of the farm that makes it acceptable to kill some of them (field mice, etc.) so that humans may eat, but not acceptable to kill others (pigs, etc.) so we may eat?” His reply (Regan, 1999, personal communication) was that we must choose the method of food production that causes the least harm to animals. (I will refer to this concept as The Least Harm Principle or LHP.) In his book, Regan (1983) calls this the “minimize harm principle” and he describes it in the following way:

“Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm.”

…

Production of forages, such as pasture-based forages, would cause less harm to field animals (kill fewer) than intensive crop production systems typically used to produce food for a vegan diet. This is because pasture forage production requires fewer passages through the field with tractors and other farm equipment. The killing of animals of the field would be further reduced if herbivorous animals (ruminants like cattle) were used to harvest the forage and convert it into meat and dairy products. Would such production systems cause less harm to the field animals? Again, accurate numbers aren’t available comparing the number of animals of the field that are killed with these different cropping systems, but “The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife” populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in ‘no-till’ agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet.

The specific numbers that Davis concocted at the end of that passage — after conceding that there was no way to calculate the true numbers — ended up sabotaging what would otherwise have been a salient point. He seems to have been so sure that he’d won this argument that he was happy to estimate that raising animals on pasture still kills plenty of wild animals. Hey, why not? Industrial agriculture kills twice as many, so the meaties totally have this one in the bag, right? 

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If you saw a goat-shaped cloud in the sky recently, it might have been the soul of one of Mark Zuckerberg’s meals. The CEO of facebook and anti-hero of David Fincher’s The Social Network recently announced that he has already murdered a goat, a chicken, a pig and a lobster as part of a one-year plan to eat only animals he has snuffed out himself, in a quest to get in touch with the death that produces the flesh on his plate.

The burning question now is “So how to vegans feel about this?” Zuckerberg is killing animals, which vegans are against. But then again, so does everyone else — they’re just less direct about it. Since vegans are not a monolithic entity (as vegan commenters never tire of reminding me), it’s impossible to specify a single vegan reaction, because there is a variety of views. However, only one of these views is interesting, so that’s the one I’m going to talk about.

For some vegans, there is just one possible sound conclusion to arrive at if you ever think about food even for a second — veganism. Pondering the source of your sustenance, the ethics of killing animals, health and sustainability is a one-way road that splits into two paths. Take the left path and you go straight to veganism. Take the right path and you dilly-dally pointlessly in lacto-ovo vegetarianism for a while as you delay facing the full consequences of your new knowledge. That road, of course, eventually curves into veganism. Thinking about food must lead to veganism eventually.

So these vegans tend to get irritated when people think about food and then arrive at a conclusion other than veganism. This is one reason that the paleo diet crowd is such a bother. They’ve rejected the Standard American Diet and the government’s nutritional propaganda, and yet they still eat plenty of meat. Wrong answer, guys. To vegans with this perspective, Zuckerberg got off to a good start by realizing he was disconnected from his food and by wanting to remedy this by investigating the blood-letting that makes his meals possible, but he fumbled the second he picked up a knife instead of a box of tofu.

Once you think thought A (“Where did this flesh on my plate come from?”), then you have to think thought B (“Go vegan”). That’s just how thoughts work, Zuckerberg.

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